What is the Lens

The Lens is an open global cyberinfrastructure to make the innovation system more efficient and fair, more transparent and inclusive.

The Lens is building an open platform for Innovation Cartography. Specifically, the Lens serves nearly all of the patent documents in the world as open, annotatable digital public goods that are integrated with scholarly and technical literature along with regulatory and business data. The Lens will allow document collections, aggregations, and analyses to be shared, annotated, and embedded to forge open mapping of the world of knowledge-directed innovation. Ultimately, this will restore the role of the patent system as a teaching resource to inspire and inform entrepreneurs, citizens and policy makers.

Within the next two years, we expect to host over 95% of the world's patent information and link to most of the scholarly literature, creating open public innovation portfolios of individuals and institutions. Using all open source components, we are working to create open schemas by which patent documents can be used to teach and communicate, rather than confuse and intimidate.

Underlying data and analytics will be available to the public with APIs. By creating and freely sharing APIs and by building modular, standardized specifications, we can envision growing public use of innovation cartography to decrease fear, uncertainty and doubt hindering investment and enthusiasm.

Patent datasets

Check out the latest stats on the Lens patent data (coverage, date range, and various accessible metadata). Updates are performed on 3-4 week basis at the present time. And, here are the various patent data sources ingested and integrated in the Lens: